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Something To Crow About

With white wine and a hen, a tradition goes delectably modern

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BARRY WONG / THE SEATTLE TIMES An Alsatian-American version of Coq au Vin revels in riesling and forest mushrooms. Buttered noodles make the perfect seasonal accompaniment.

COQ AU VIN means "rooster with wine," and originally the dish took advantage of the tenderizing effects of wine to render a tough old bird easier to eat. But the wisdom of modern farming has deemed that, except for the occasional male left around to fertilize the eggs, all chickens should be female. Chickens are sexed almost as soon as they hatch, and males are immediately discarded, so the poultry sections of the larders of the world are stocked almost exclusively with hens, and roosters are hard to come by.

It may soothe the stickler to note that the same is true in France, where this dish originated. Even there, hens are considered more tender and flavorful than their suitors, and home cooks and restaurant chefs alike routinely prepare female birds in the manner devised for cooking roosters.

Once I did have an opportunity to eat true Coq au Vin. Some friends of mine used to keep a little flock of chickens for the eggs, and they kept a rooster just to make the little flock complete. But the randy old fellow was troublesome; he exhausted his harem, attacking them with disturbingly brute force and even charging unwitting people who dared to walk through his yard. Eventually it was determined that he should be dealt with in the form of a stew. A large bottle of red wine and a pound of bacon were ordered up, and the bad-tempered bird was summarily dispatched by means of a hatchet ordinarily reserved for splitting kindling wood.

At the time, I thought the whole situation was somewhat barbaric. I followed the ovo-lacto regimen popular in the late 1970s, embracing milk and eggs but not meat, and I considered myself a vegetarian. But the animals weren't mine, and I thought I had no say in the sentencing of the rooster. So when I was invited to dinner and discovered that the piece de la resistance was the old rooster I had occasionally chased off on my way to gather eggs in my neighbors' henhouse, I was a little squeamish. Initially I declined the offer of the stew.

"Oh, no thanks," I said. "I don't eat meat." I helped myself to some of the buttered noodles with parsley, and resigned myself to what looked like a rather one-dimensional repast.

"It's not really meat," insisted my friends. "It's a bird, not a mammal. And besides, you've eaten the eggs he fertilized." They had a point. And the stew smelled terrific.

"It has bacon," I protested.

"Oh, go ahead," said the host. And he put a spoonful of the steaming stuff on my plate. Mushrooms, pearl onions and a purple sauce surrounded the wedge of potentially offending flesh. I surrendered. OK, I thought, now I eat birds, and a little bacon. I had to admit that the Coq au Vin was delicious. It was, in fact, the best thing I had eaten in a long, long time.

Since then, I have cooked a number of chickens in wine, but I seldom follow the classic formula for coq au vin, which calls for an overnight soak in red wine. This step is unnecessary with tender chicken anyway. And ever since I discovered the variation devised in Alsace for Coq au Riesling, I have been inching further and further away from the Burgundian red-wine version and ever closer to an Alsatian-American original.

Greg Atkinson is author of "West Coast Cooking." He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Barry Wong is a Seattle-based freelance photographer. He can be reached at studio@barrywongphoto.com.